Some singers are born with it: a teardrop in their voice that grabs you by the heart and refuses to let go. Tammy Wynette had it; just listen to her mourn how “the sun will never shine in Apartment #9” and your ear will catch the throb in her throat that echoes the song’s steel guitar. Roy Orbison singing “In Dreams,” Sam Cooke praising divine healing on “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” Emmylou Harris grieving Gram Parsons on “Sweet Chariot” — all of them have it too, the quiver that can’t be taught, only expressed.
Teddy Thompson possesses one of those voices, a golden, vivid instrument capable of conjuring joy — though not in excess; he’s English — and caverns of heartache. The quality, he says over a bottle of San Pellegrino at a coffee shop in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant on a sunny April afternoon, is “subconscious.”
